In February last year I wrote about commonalities between the church and the courtroom. It occurs to me now that I left the underlying reason for that comparison implicit. As I intend now to further develop the point I made last year, those underlying reasons should be explained.
I have written about this question before, years ago, with more words. I ask it again now. What is a god?
A god is an axiom, which is a truth taken on faith.
Faith concerns that which cannot be empirically inspected or logically justified. If you can find a reason to believe something, you can’t have faith in it.
Man is the religious animal, the animal that takes things on faith, that can act according purely to faith. Acting entirely according to faith is called ‘ritual’. True ritual has no practical real-world referent – it is a set of actions that exists purely as a reflection of faith. It is the acting out of faith in the world, the making of something purely abstract, inhuman, into something practical and human – an action. Abstraction is thereby made accessible as a tangible thing and a memory. By definition any ritual must look insane or meaningless from the outside, because it doesn’t have an explanation that stems from a mechanical/physical cause.
Man is the religious animal. This quality sets us apart from the other animals. It is impossible for a person to exist without some form of faith, some reasonless axiomatic belief, a set of subconscious standards by which one’s lenses are formed and by which one must judge all things. Obviously whether that faith corresponds with a particular set of commonly held beliefs i.e. organised religion is a totally separate question.
The first question I ask of someone new is whether they source their divine belief from something phenomenal or something noumenal. That tells me the fundamental nature of their character. (I don’t literally ask them – I mean I try to work it out.) But each person worships, without choice, some form of a god, whether phenomenal or noumenal.
The god of the legal profession is the law. The law is a Platonic idea, a jewel constantly polished and never smoothed. Each new day, with all its uninspected events, is a new crag to be rounded over by judgments that make ever finer distinctions, that tease out the correct approach to ever-novel facts. We all know this. In fact I think I stole the jewel metaphor from Ace Attorney.
With all this in mind, in the essay referred to above I compared, focusing on the meaning of ritual, the church and the courtroom.
I now compare the monastery with the law firm.
In the mediaeval period, as we know, the monastic world was one unto itself. It had its own networks, politics, famous figures, maps that overlaid atop the secular world’s maps; it had its own history and so on. It was a separate, hidden, overlaid universe.
Applied to fiction
A brief digression.
I can never resist making a point about fictional stories, and here I note the similarity between the above paragraph and the old genre called ‘urban fantasy’ in which magic co-exists alongside the mundane. But urban fantasy is actually not that novel an idea – it’s just the circumstance in which we all truly live.
Nobody lives in the ‘real world’. We all live in an oblique world of our own that doesn’t quite correspond purely to the shared physical world – that is the world as perceived, and the world as formed by our thought. To each of us, all phenomena assume their character based on our perceptions and ideas. Usually, our perceptions are sufficiently similar to allow society to exist. Where, between two individuals, there is a significant divergence of opinion concerning the function or meaning of a phenomenon, this is because the natural mental distance between them is noticeably large. That might be either because one person has a psychiatric problem, and sees windmills as giants, or because there’s a wider cultural problem of people interpreting the same events too differently and having opinions too divergent to form a cohesive society. Cf – though Tolstoy makes a slightly different point – ‘All happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’.
Return to the text
Returning to the monastery.
Second or third sons of sufficiently well-off families would often become monks, leaving the firstborn with the sum of their father’s property; the second son would be well educated, live reasonably well, and be divorced from secular concerns (ideally). But within the monastery there was a whole hierarchy, all those monks buzzing about preparing their manuscripts, teaching villages, preserving the past, conducting services and hosting visitors and advising the secular populations.
All of their activity, ultimately, is in service of sometimes the ritual, the divine liturgy, and sometimes the effect that liturgy has on the world (e.g. the conveyancing, the loan agreement, or the negotiations that don’t need to go to court).
The monastery was the place a young intelligent person needing support would go back in the day, and so there was a surfeit of monks. Now, a young intelligent person needing money goes to work in a law firm, and so there is a surfeit of lawyers.
In any firm there is an entire hierarchy of associates and partners and paralegals buzzing about preparing their manuscripts, advising clients, researching the past, conducting trials and hosting partners and visitors, and providing, on occasion, pro bono legal services.
The metaphor extends further. The church internally regulates itself, with the bishops essentially controlling where priests are expected to practice, and the priests can be defrocked and moved around and are supposed to be given reasons for such decisions. Sometimes they’re not given reasons or they’re unhappy with the reasons and then the complaints they can make start sounding suspiciously like applications for conventional administrative reviews. In so many words they complain of lacking procedural fairness and inconsistency of decisions with canon laws. Such things closely resemble the movements of judges and the decisions of legal disciplinary tribunals.
And then of course you have the fact that there are big monasteries, small monasteries, different traditions with different founders and different conceptions of the law, all focused on the same big, far-off points – all the disparate firms with their different specialities, all the partners using High Court decisions in their own ways. ‘This is Benedict & Associates, how can we help you today?’
And then you have baptism and confession on the one hand, and admission to the profession coupled with, at least in Australia, admissions of any relevant conduct that goes towards fitness and propriety to practice as a lawyer, on the other. I need hardly explain the likeness.
More spiritual aspects of the legal and commercial world: a company is an egregore. It is a shared thought-form that exists abstractly due to a collective effort; it moves and acts in the world through its members. Jonathan Pageau, some years ago now, made a point about the embodiment of Santa in the world through the actions of shopping-centre Santas. In some old essay I compared that to the Nerevarine ‘mantling’ Nerevar in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. A company being an egregore is just an extension of my old point to a collective body.
A little point about names and civilisations
A thing is defined by what it does. But when the thing begins to act differently from that particular pattern of behaviour which gave it its name (and which the name came to mean), its truth leaves its name behind. We imagine a possible future for that something, and when it leaves the imagined path signified by the name, we forget the thing in itself. The name becomes a ‘legend’, to use one possible term, as the man behind it dies; it then becomes possible to model the behaviour of the legend (the name) in your own life. When you do this you are allowing metaphor – pure abstract thought – to illogically influence your actions (putting on a Santa suit in Australian summer and pretending to care about what children want in the shopping centre.) As I discussed in the previous essay, acting illogically according to symbolic meaning is called ‘ritual’. It defines the character of human existence – it sets us apart from the animals.
See also my poetry collection ‘Rime of the Ancient Memer’ – the section titled ‘Eleven Secret Herbs and Spices’.
Civilisation and barbarism exist on a spectrum independent of quality or virtue. Civilisation refers to globalism or the ability to interact with others. The sacrifice of the self to the other, to the point, in some cases, where one has very little self left. Barbarians by definition speak a language no other person speaks. A person without shared experiences may say the same words as others, but will not mean the same thing by them (though in most cases this point is not enlivened). The words spoken take meaning only from the speaker’s experience. If the speaker’s experience is of life alone, if they share no experiences with others – if something is perceived only by them alone – their use of the word to describe that thing is understandable only to them. This is because words take meaning only from shared experience. Such people are the only ones who, it can be said, truly have their own ideas. Aristotle said a man content alone was a beast or a god – I say he is both (Simone Weil, on gravity – the same point I usually cite from her) and I say he is also a barbarian and a hero.
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